Storytellersunplugged

One of the sad truths of writing is that one cannot simply write.
That’s the high school lit class fantasy, of course – someday you’ll
write the Great American Telepathic Talking Horse Novel which will
sell millions, make you rich and famous. This novel will, of course,
be so well written that editors will be magically drawn by its
goodness to your house, and will beat each other senseless with large
bags of money in order to obtain for themselves the privilege of
publishing it. Fame and fortune will naturally follow, all without you
lifting a finger – other than to type this magnum opus.

This is, of course, pure poppycock. There’s so much more a writer
needs to do these days beyond producing manuscripts that-

Err.

Hang on one moment.

Hmm. Apparently the update on my web site is overdue. Give me five
minutes, folks. I’ll be right back.

Well, maybe ten. Fifteen at the outside. Bloody Dreamweaver…

Ahem. Sorry about that. Now where was I?

Oh, right. The stuff you have to do above and beyond writing. The sad
truth is that even the best writers need to work their fannies off in
order to make sure people know about them and their work. The book,
after all, is a book. It just sits there. It relies on someone else –
in a perfect world, the PR department, but who among us lives there –
to let the world know that it exists, has a great personality, and
likes long walks on the beach and listening to the Bee Gees.

To the art-for-art’s-sake crowd, this is called “marketing” and
“selling out” and all sorts of other ugly things. To those of us who
enjoy receiving renumeration for our writing so that we can go on
writing, it’s called “basic common sense.” There are umpty-million
things competing for the reader’s eye, time, and dollar out there, and
expecting that people will simply find you without any effort on your
part is pollyannahood of the first water.

What this means in practical terms is-

Oh, crud. Hang on. Apparently there are six more fields to fill out on
my Amazon Connect page. This won’t take long. I swear it.

Right. I’m back.

Anyway, as I was saying, there is a great deal of writing about
writing, specifically your own writing, that a writer needs to do
today. These days, odds are that if you’re writing professionally, you
have a web site. You’ve also got a profile on Amazon, a presence on n
mailing lists and message boards (where n=some number large enough to
fill half your allotted writing time with email and postings), and if
you’re lucky, other regular presences like, say, a monthly essay at a
prestigious writers’ blog site.

All of these are wonderful things, and on a certain level, important
ones as well. Time invested in letting people know you’ve got a story
coming out in a magazine will hopefully drive traffic to that
magazine, boosting its sales and hopefully preventing the editor for
setting any of your future submissions on fire immediately.
Maintaining a dedicated forum on a highly trafficked message board
gives you a constant stream of eyes on your updates, helping to make
people aware of your work.

On the other hand, if you don’t do this, you run the risk of your work
getting lost. Let’s face it, there are a lot of books out there, a lot
of magazines and web sites and video games and God knows what else,
all competing for a very narrow slice of shelf space and/or bandwidth.
Even those folks who are actively interested in your work need to know
where to look for it, or the odds are they’ll never find it.

Now, I’ve had folks tell me that it’s okay not to promote your stuff
because the publisher will do that for you. If you’re lucky, that’s
the case, but relying on others to direct people to your writing is
risky at best. For one thing, they don’t have the vested interest in
your work that you do. Odds are you’re not the only author they’re
working with, so the odds are-

Hang on, what’s that? Interview questions to answer by email? Sixteen
of them? All right, this might take a while. Back in a bit.

Whew. Now, back to the topic at hand. As I was saying, the odds are
that you’re not the only author that publisher is working with, so
you’re not going to be the only one getting their attention. There’s
nothing wrong with this, as they need to pay their bills, too, but it
highlights the dangers of letting someone else bang the drum for you.

So that means that as a writer, you need to spend a lot of your time,
not writing, but rather writing about writing, or writing about your
writing, or letting other people know that you’re writing. That means
ultimately divvying up your writing time into essentially production
and marketing. The best book in the world won’t go anywhere if nobody
knows about it, while the best web presence out there won’t mean boo
if there’s nothing to back it up. Like, say, a book, or a story, or a
game, or something that actually proves that you’re a writer.

So get writing. And writing about writing. If you want to do this,
you’ll need both.

–
Richard E. Dansky
Writer, Game Designer, and Cad
(Not necessarily in that order)